I wish I could flux-capacitor this image back to my confused, terrified mid-’90s self, with a note saying, “It’s going to be all right.”
Handsome, the man next door, grew Elephant Ears. “The biggest leaf you can grow at this latitude,” I heard him say, over and over again.
He didn’t say this to me, but to the dozens of passersby who asked about the Elephant Ears, every day, as they made their way from Washington Avenue to the Grand Army Plaza subway station. A sample conversation:
“What is that plant?”
“Elephant Ear.”
“Well, look at that.”
“Biggest leaf you can grow at this latitude. Theyey grow from bulbs. You should see the ones in the back. These are in pots, so they’re runts. The ones in back—oh brotha!”
And this, of course, is why Handsome grew Elephant Ears. He spent a lot of time on his stoop. Up to six hours a day. Handsome was retired. He would not have looked out of place in a cop bar. But Handsome was ex-school system, not ex-police. And there were no ex-school system bars. Handsome had been a maintenance man-turned-manager of maintenance men turned house-rich retiree. He’d bought his brownstone at the peak of crack for shells and beads. “Eighty thousand,” I heard him say, “And the roof was in the basement.” He’d been restoring it, little by little, for almost thirty years. For fifteen of those thirty years, the place had been livable. Now he was slowing down, he said. He had nothing but stoop time now.
I never asked Handsome about the Elephant Ears, because I’d already overheard everything there is to know about Elephant Ears. I’d also overheard most of what there was to know about Handsome. I knew his name was Handsome, for example, because once a day, usually around 5:45pm, a young thickset woman with a pretty dollbaby face and a mahagony finish and an Island lilt and an afternoon sashay that fit her thickset but but unheavy frame walked by and said
“Hey, Handsome.”
And he answered, “Hey, Gorgeous.”
And Gorgeous would stay a while, sometimes for a glass of wine, sometimes just for the conversation, which was plentiful.
Here’s what I learned, sitting ten feet away, behind my open window, at my desk, where I did the bulk of my not-working in those days.
Gorgeous: “They gonna bury my uncle. What they chahge for just the coffin—oh!”
Handsome: “That’s why I buried my mother out back.”
Gorgeous: “Go on with your silly self!”
Handsome: “It’s true! This is the truth! She died in Boca. And she’d chosen cremation, I don’t know, years back. So I go down to Florida to get it done, and the funeral parlor shows me the bill. I say, no way. Five thousand for a box? A box you’re gonna burn? Five thousand? I can get a box for zero thousand. And they say, what are you talking about? and I say, I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. I’m going to go down to that supermarket, that Publix or whatnot, on the corner, and I’m going to go in the back and ask for one of those six by three cardboard boxes they deliver the toilet paper in. And I’m gonna bring it back here and we’re gonna put my mother in it and we’re gonna burn her. And they say, what’s wrong with you? And I say, nothing, what’s wrong with you—trying to sell people five thousand dollar boxes you’re gonna burn? And I go to the Publix and I get them to give me a six by three cardboard toilet paper warehouse box, and I bring it back and say, put my mother in that. They say OK, and I say, and one more thing: I want to watch. And they say, what’s wrong with you, are you crazy? Are you sick? And I say, no I’m not crazy, I’m not sick. I used to operate an incinerator for the school system. I know how it works, and I want to watch. Because I want to make sure it’s her in there, you know? So they had to let me watch.”
Would you like to hear a story about
a) an inhuman, though not inhumane, detective
b) an obsessive continuity editor for a comic-book publisher
c) a self-flagellating joke writer melting down at the wedding of his cousin, an intelligence officer
?
That’s for now.
Would you like to read a novel about
a) a Civil War historian fleeing a troubled marriage, who gets himself embroiled in an equally troubled movie shoot and, ultimately, an actual civil war
b) sex
?
May 19, 1942
Day four hundred of my self-imposed exile here in the Hotel New Yorker. My patent battle with Edison rages on: I wish him worms. Compounding my frustrations, Bernice the pigeon and I are fighting. Apparently the worst sin a man can commit is commenting favorably on the plumage of any bird who is not Bernice—in this case, a macaw. A PHOTOGRAPH of a macaw, I might add! Irrational jealousy: Another scourge that eugenics will someday eliminate
Henceforth, I shall record my thoughts in an electronic medium I call an “ElectroDiary.” One day, every citizen shall have his very own ElectroDiary, on which he can record his own daily musings AND read the entries left by others on their ElectroDiaries. Eventually, we shall all read one another’s thoughts, as they occur to us! But by that point, with any luck, the Earth will have been destroyed by an effulgent cosmic Being shaped like a pigeon, yet composed of pure energy
Perhaps there is a way to transmit photos of macaws over the ElectroDiary? I shall conduct experiments… quietly. At night. While Bernice sleeps.
“I’m a comedian,” he said.
“I’m an entertainer,” he said.
“Anyone who takes what I say seriously is so some kind of nutjob,” he said, adding: “We are everywhere. And we’re stronger than we realize.”
Like any good comedian, like any good entertainer, he staked out his patch. And then set fire to it. Because that’s how you get people to find you, when you’re lost in the woods: Stand still and set fire to something. Preferably yourself. It’s the difference between toeing SOS in the sand and writing it in gasoline. Teague understood this.
He also understood that tears were more powerful than invective. That sentimentality was a better lever than grievance. That the Greeks, those fine warmakers, small-d democrats all, were given to tears, nostalgia. They had a weakness for bad art: a Velvet Elvis would’ve launched at least two hundred ships. And a story of faithlessness and heartbreak? Well, you know how that went down…
Here’s how it begins: There is preference, as there has been forever. And then there is an engine for aggregating preference. And once preferences are aggregated, there is data. There is predictive data. Everything is anticipated. Everything is provided, before it’s even wanted. And before long, there is no want, and then there is no choice. This is how preference destroys choice.
Humans are made of a conductive material. They are excellent conductors of preference. We are, all of us, rail laid for a train that’s never coming. If, as the great man says, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” then I think we’ll be waiting forever.
I’ve become negative, all of sudden. Negativity is also a kind of energy. It can power cities.
The professor’s walls are books. How many, I don’t know. It could be a massive apartment underneath all those books. Some of the books are on shelves, but not in rows, or even in stacks—in whorls. Maelstroms of books, Bosching up against each other, burls of books trying desperately to return to their original tree-state: Books in stacks, books in screes, landslides of books and berms of books, alluvial deposits of books in the corners of the room.
And, in the bathroom, a very nice handwritten note from Anjelica Huston, above the cracked gray marble tile, with the same little bottle of Chanel No. 19 standing guard, as it has for years.
This is what the inside of the Professor’s brain looks like. It’s what the inside of my brain will look like someday, only with fewer books and more pornography. Healthy, functional brains make math and money. Broken brains make art or, more often, crime.
The Professor has a six foot poster of herself framed and lying on the floor. It was for a festival in the early nineties. Two were made, and the theater was throwing one away.
“So I took it,” says the Professor. “But it’s not the sort of thing I can have in my house.” The poster is larger than the refrigerator. “I think I know a hair salon on 96th that wants it.”
I crouch on one side of the poster to watch a video she’s showing me: (Her television is nine inches and sits on the floor.) It’s a home movie of her trip across the ocean in 1960, to see Nkrumah’s Ghana. The color bleeds in and out—it’s a VHS rip of old super-8 footage. In it, the Professor is very young, younger than I am now; she looks like a child dressed as Ingrid Bergman for Halloween.
“You’re too young to be comfortable,” the Professor tells me
“I’m not comfortable.
“You need to some new role models,” the Professor tells me.
“The door was open,” she said. “After I kicked it in.”
“This ain’t my first rodeo,” said the man-with-the-one-blue-eye.
“Then you know,” said the girl, “that in a rodeo, the clown’s supposed to get hurt.
He looked at her with his dog’s eye. With his dog’s eye, he could see she wasn’t lying.
